Author Topic: Claviceps Purpurea: long term storage of inoculation material experiment  (Read 87 times)

n.snostorm

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Claviceps Purpurea: long term storage of inoculation material experiment
« on: April 23, 2011, 07:46:59 PM »
I'm thinking of making an experiment of storing purpurea inoculation material for a year or more using
various methods of storage.

For now I got some sclerotia getting the "cold treatment".
Then I'm thinking of putting sclerotia on agar media and incubate at 25C so it grows stroma and later collect
spores.

For collecting spores - puncture shroom heads with a needle and collect spores on a piece of glass.
After this go two parallel ways - store spores and store honeydew.

For storing spores :
 Put collected spores in small amount of distilled water and using arterial blood collecting system
with vacuumtubes suck it into storage tube through a needle.

For honeydew :
 Germinate spores on agar medium(thinking of MS basal media with added dextrose or will go with potato-dextose-agar)
 and when the honeydew stage is reached, collect it using the same method as above.

Storage format :
 some tubes will be put in a fridge at -4C,
 some tubes will be put at +1..+4,
 some tubes in liquid nitrogen. 
 
Problematic points I can think of for now :
 * I'm unsure about storing spores in water. Will it damage them or not.
   Maybe there is some better suited liquid medium to store them in.
 * If honeydew should be better stored as is or should it too be made into suspension.
 * will deep freezing in nitrogen rupture the cells of biomaterial.

After certain time passes, I will try to inoculate media using stored material and see how it goes.
 

I'm writing this to induce discussion/critique/tips/etc.
Maybe I'm completely wrong on everything, have read so many papers/literature/posts during the last days about claviceps, that
it's all big chaos in my brain and needs ordering.

overunity33

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Re: Claviceps Purpurea: long term storage of inoculation material experiment
« Reply #1 on: April 24, 2011, 12:20:52 AM »
The best thing to do would be to germinate the scelortia so you have the fruit bodies/the sexual spores... Put them in solution and plate them across like 20 plates with flourescine and kh2po4... The high yielders will glow under a blacklight.  But depending on your goals you probably dont want to use purpurea, you should be looking for paspali if you want to ferment it..

n.snostorm

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Re: Claviceps Purpurea: long term storage of inoculation material experiment
« Reply #2 on: April 24, 2011, 12:25:03 PM »
Oh, I should have not forgotten to mention intention and goals - I have possibility to grow rye field far away from other agricultural
activities. So far I had no luck with nature doing it's job and infecting my field, even though in this region ergot is a big problem, and
farmers fields are infested every year. So I want to infect it manually to grow sclerotia and get more material for experiments with in vitro
cultures. I'm aware that for certain goals it's paspali one would be after, but for now, until paspali source is acquired, I want to experiment
and build skills/know-how with what is available to me.

Tsathoggua

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Re: Claviceps Purpurea: long term storage of inoculation material experiment
« Reply #3 on: April 26, 2011, 11:14:14 AM »
A fluorescein counterstain can be useful, its fluorescence color in the presence of ergot alkaloids is different from that of van urk reagent (of course van urk contains sulfuric acid, and testing the entire plate, is going to murder your culture, so this is for samples/regrown seperate plates for that purpose only)

So one can determine yields by observing the fluorescence from the van urk reagent on a differently colored fluorescent background, thanks to the fluorescein (halogenated fluorescein derivatives have also been used for this technique)

Fluorescein doesn't appear to harm the fungus, at the low concentrations required.
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